[slightly off-topic] programmable speech recognition software

[Stefan Franke]

On Fri, 22 Oct 1999 01:51:21 -0400, "Tim Peters"
<tim_one at email.msn.com> wrote:

>What is "a room installation"?
>
Hmm, propably a messy homegrown German translation. Should mean a
situation at a public exhibition. 

Our intention is to create a kind of interaction by listening to
people with arranging microphones and processing the audio stream
using several methods among which are pitch detection, speech
recognition and recording/transformation/playback of sampled phrases.

The manyfold results are then used to influence sound playback and
generated computer graphics.

>Speaker-independent is hard.  From a recording is hard.  If people aren't
>speaking into a high-quality microphone, it's very hard.  If it's not
>intentional speech (i.e., if people don't know they're talking to a
>computer -- they're just chatting), it's very hard.  The good news is that
>German is easy (compared to the rest of this).
Now that's *really* some good news <wink>.

[further encouragement snipped]

>If you want to play with SR on MS systems to "get
>a feel for it", visit the little-known:
>
>    http://www.microsoft.com/IIT/
>
>You can download a free SR engine and development kit (note that this is for
>hard-core Windows developers; there's nothing of use to end users there).

Thanks for the link. I already had it from a previous post of yours.
I'm writing this while waiting for the 40MB download. Are you able to
tell something about its recognition quality?

As you may anticipate from the above, it's not necessary for my
purposes to recognize contiguous text. Some isolated keyphrases would
be more than sufficient, even - say - special kinds of systematic
errors or misinterpretations. My expectations are not as high as my
initial posting may lead to suggest.

[error]-[error]-[pause]-[error]-[error]-[error]-[error]-ly yr's
Stefan